Building the Infrastructure Behind AI-Enabled Field Service - with Deniz Mullis of Cytiva

**Daniel Faggella** (0:12)
Welcome everyone to the Emerge AI in Business Podcast. Today's guest is Deniz Mullis, Senior Director of Global Technical Operations at Cytiva. Deniz discusses what really happens when an experienced field engineer walks out the door, and why the knowledge they carried rarely serves anywhere but their own heads. She walks through what it takes to scale that expertise across an entire technician team once a new AI tool is already in place. Today's episode is sponsored by Aquant. A quick note for our audience, that the views and opinions expressed by Deniz on today's program are her own and do not reflect those of Cytiva or its leadership. In this episode, we cover how service leaders can move beyond deploying an AI tool to actually building the trust, feedback loops and change management that make technician knowledge capture stick for the long haul. To go deeper on this topic and learn how consultants are winning business with evidence-based AI ROI and building long-term capabilities instead of chasing short-term gains, download our free PDF report, 3 Keys to Thriving in the Coming Era of Automation, at emerge.com/cok1.
That's emerj.com/cok1 to download your copy. Now, the conversation with Deniz.
Deniz, welcome to the Emerge AI in Business Podcast Studio. Thanks.

**Deniz Mullis** (1:48)
Thanks for having me.

**Daniel Faggella** (1:49)
I'm very interested to hear your take on our conversation today. I think that something that we keep on coming back to is looking at how strange it is that the most valuable person on a service team is often the hardest one to explain on paper. Nothing in their file really captures what they know.
It's not written down anywhere. It basically is just built for call by call, years of experience. And then one day, this person decides to retire or take another job, and everyone acts surprised that things are all of the sudden getting harder than they used to be. So I want us to start there. When someone like that walks out the door, what goes with them and why does it hit an organization harder than people expect?

**Deniz Mullis** (2:32)
It's a great topic, and unfortunately, it's one that is happening more and more. We're really seeing our service engineers not staying as long in roles, moving on to other opportunities. So if we look at the number of years of experience in the organization, that's going down, down, down over time. So this is a real scenario that we deal with, and what is the feeling when someone super experienced leaves? You know, if we're lucky, they're retiring and we have a notice, and we do cross-training, but even that's difficult. There's so much locked in terms of knowledge in a technician's brain that goes with it. So it is something that the organization definitely feels.
And I know with a lot of organizations, especially with IT, that we cover dozens of products, and we can be single-threaded as far as subject matter experts on certain products, that when one person goes, it's not like there's two or three other people with that level of knowledge that is still around. So it's a big deal. Certainly we need to find ways to capture that knowledge well before the person leaves, as the knowledge is being created. So I know we're gonna talk more about that, but yeah, this is a real problem that you don't think about just a month or two before someone leaves. This is kind of a everyday problem as it relates to knowledge.

**Daniel Faggella** (3:52)
Yeah, before we get into possible solutions and how we should be thinking about it, I'm sure that we have listeners thinking that, oh, we've picked up on cracks in our workflows and systems and results, and they're not necessarily tying it back to technicians that have left or retired. So what are kind of the indicators of that? What does it look like in the first couple of weeks after someone like that leaves? Where do we start to see the cracks?

**Deniz Mullis** (4:17)
Well, I think that the most immediate is in escalation. So in the background, I think for those of us who are building systems to help the service engineers, we think that the tools, quote unquote, are everything that they use. The fact of the matter is there is a lot of informal network peer-to-peer conversations that happen that when someone leaves is gone. So usually what you see is in the technical escalations where you have field engineers that are struggling on site or before they go to a service event.
They call their buddy, that buddy isn't there anymore.
They struggle. That's where you feel it. So it may even take a while before it comes up in your metrics and things like that. But basically, there's this angst in the field for those that relied on that individual, when that individual goes. And then that could be reflected in response time. It could be reflected on how prepared the engineer feels when they go to the service event, because they were used to talking to someone beforehand. And now they're kind of going in cold. So that's kind of where you see it first. But managers, you may not see it until a collection of those come up and people start to complain or it reflects in your metrics. Yeah.